Below are the most interesting excerpts from Lindelof and Cuse’s audio commentary of The Constant from the Season 4 DVD:

Carlton Cuse: This was one of the hardest story breaks on the show.  It took us about 5 weeks, normally it takes 2 weeks to break an episode.  It just was a really hard episode to figure out what was sort of above the water line.  When we think about stories we use a metaphor of an iceberg.  You have to construct the entire iceberg, but only 20% of the iceberg is ever actually seen. The same is true with a story.  You have to make a lot more of the story up and you have to make it all make sense but then you just show the part on screen that you want to show.  A lot of the challenge here was how much explanation goes on.  We didn’t want to bog things down in a lot of esoteric conversation about time travel but we wanted to find an emotional through line.  And that emotional through line became the essence of the show in “What is Desmond’s constant?”  Yes he’s time traveling, yes he’s experiencing an existence in two different consciousnesses, but the emotional constant that was taking him through it was Penny.

Damon Lindelof: When he [Minkowski] just said “I was on a ferris wheel” I cannot wait to do a scene at some point in the next two seasons where in the background we just see Minkowski riding a ferris wheel and we realize “Oh, that’s where he leapt to.”

Carlton Cuse: The one thing we insidiously avoid when it comes to time travel on Lost is what is known as paradox.  This whole notion that you show up and see your same self in another period of time.

Damon Lindelof: We’re going to come to paradox in a moment, but essentially this is our flux capacitor scene.  Desmond has just come to Faraday and here’s a key line here:

Daniel Faraday: You can’t change the future.

Damon Lindelof: There it is.  You can’t change the future.  Those are the rules on Lost which are very had to adhere to.  Because if you tell the audience that something that Desmond does in 96 can alter the present, you go back to the episode we did last year where Ms. Hawking comes to Desmond and says no matter what you do the course of time will find a way to course correct.  So you can save somebody’s life who’s supposed to die but eventually the universe will find a way to kill them anyways.

Mark Goldman (editor) : So you can change the immediate future?

Damon Lindelof: Yeah, you can change the immediate future.

Carlton Cuse: What we’re trying to illustrate here is that this process was also not a constant process.  People experience it differently.  What’s happening to Minkowski is not the same as what’s happening to Desmond and what’s happening to Desmond is not the same as what’s happening to Eloise.  The fundamental process is the same but the results vary.  Sort of like how different people can take steroids and have different results.  Different people can be exposed…

Damon Lindelof: As Carlton was basically mentioning Eloise’s consciousness was just sent an hour into the future where she already knows how to run the maze.  Desmond’s past consciousness is traveling into the future as well whereas Minkowski’s present consciousness is traveling to the past because as we will soon learn he has no future to travel to since he’s about to die on the boat.

Carlton Cuse: Now you know why it took us 5 weeks to break this story.  And the thing was we had to work out all of these permutations and we’re trying not to violate the concept of paradox.  That’s the part where we find that time travel is not engaging for the audience.  You want to see the people move back and forth between the two different time zones but the kind of encounters with themselves and alterations of the future was something we really are opposed to.  We want people to be invested in the future.  We don’t want the audience to think they’ve seen Kate and Jack have this intense conversation in a flash forward at the end of Season 3 and then discover somehow that it means nothing; that basically a new parallel future could be constructed in which that is rendered as having not ever existed.  No.  That was real.  It means something.  That can be the only inevitable course of events.

Damon Lindelof: Minkowski was absolutely essential to this story because this is another tenet of successful time travel stories and the function that essentially Q played in “All Good Things” which is there is someone who is undergoing and understands the same series of events as our protagonist.  Faraday can speculate as to what’s happening to Desmond but Minkowski actually knows what is happening to Desmond emotionally.

Carlton Cuse: We wanted Desmond at some point in this story to see himself and see what he looks like.  His consciousness you realize — this story is told from the point of view of the 1996 Desmond  — so that’s is the first time he really gets to see himself looking like Eddie Vedder [...] The hardest thing to crack on a story level is here you have a very complex time travel episode and we wanted it like everything else on the show not to be just hard core genre.  So we had to figure out a way to really have the episode have some emotional resonance.  We like to refer to both of our mothers.  This is one of those episodes where they might not really understand everything that’s going on but they were clearly set up for the big emotional payoff that’s coming up.  I think the show succeeds at its best when it does both things.  It provides fodder for the mythology fans and we can take on some cool genre things and put our own spin on them but always first and foremost look at those emotional connections which we believe is why the larger part of the audience is watching.

Damon Lindelof: What does he have to achieve in the past that’s going to help him in the present?  The idea that we came up with is he has to get Penny’s number. This very stupid idea that when a guy first meets a girl he’s just trying to get her number now suddenly the entire future of this relationship — and in fact the season finale of season 4 hinges upon Desmond’s ability to convince a 1996 Penny to give him her phone number and not change it.

Damon Lindelof: And this is a fairly intriguing little coda that we stuck on to the end of the episode that was always in the script: “If anything goes wrong Desmond Hume will be my constant.”  Obviously this is all setup for Faraday’s own story.  One would certainly ask why he didn’t remember having ever met Desmond if in fact this had occurred.

Carlton Cuse: And that is a good question.

Damon Lindelof: And that is an excellent question to be asking, and that is your first clue.

Thanks to blog.timelypersuasion.com for the transcript.

Buy Season 4 on DVD to hear the complete commentary.

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